After 25 years in Silicon Valley,
I have returned to Santa Barbara
I started out as a writer/editor at Santa Barbara Magazine in its earliest days. Now I write text for websites and brochures and ads the same way I wrote articles: as an informational conversation with a human reader. A copywriter assembles all the information about your company and refines it to bring the most important parts […]
If you want people to read it, make it easy to read.
Most people seem to think “readability” is a foo-foo add-on, or catering to imbeciles. We’re too serious to worry about readability, see. Or, this ain’t school, we aren’t chained by your archaic “rules of grammar” that were made by old white men before there was even an internet. As a freelance copywriter, I’m always looking […]
Santa Barbara Web Design Professionals
It’s been a couple of months since I moved to Santa Barbara and I’ve been contacting the local web designers to offer my copywriting services. I’ve identified 79 local web design shops. You can see my full list here.
The kind of copywriting I’m bringing to Santa Barbara
In a previous era of my career, my freelance copywriting assignments came from ad agencies and graphic design shops. Now, they’ve been replaced by web-design shops. I’ve been searching the websites of local web shops, hundreds of them, and I see that few of them mention copywriting, and even fewer list a copywriter on staff. […]
I’ve moved back to Santa Barbara
My writing career began here long ago–I was on the masthead as Associate Editor for Issue #3 of Santa Barbara Magazine. I spent a couple years writing Dodge commercials for BBDO Detroit, then returned to Santa Barbara as a freelance copywriter in the 1980s. Then I left town to go to the Bay Area for […]
What’s the first thing about your company that you want people to know?
Some companies have never articulated what it is they are offering. They have no elevator pitch. Their site assures us they are the best and that they deliver optimal solutions. They proclaim that they are different from the other guys. They assume you have at the forefront of your mind every known fact about the other […]
What a copywriter adds when you’re advertising your technology.
Graphics folks and coders are typically indifferent to the substance of the text they are manipulating. They are highly focused on the look and the functioning of your site. They accept whatever text their technology clients provide. I recently looked at the websites of a couple hundred web design shops on California’s Central Coast. Virtually […]
If it’s readable, it will work better.
For technical products, should advertising text be readable? Hardly anybody ever reads advertising copy, even if it is the very best. So why go to the effort of making it readable? Some people think the idea of “readability” is a concession to morons, a dumbing down, an insult to the seriousness of their corporate intentions. […]
Technical copywriting and me.
Why do I think I’m qualified to do technical copywriting. I’ve done a lot of it in the past, but I’m an adbiz guy, not a technical writer. I know how to separate out the boilerplate and chaff from a company’s literature and pare it down to the red meat of their story. What I […]
Copywriting for menubars? Yep.
I was researching something else and came across these two tech companies with diametrically opposed menubars. One is so completely generic that you cannot get the slightest glimmer of what it is that they do. Sangfor presents zero information about themselves in the menubar. It’s up to the visitor to want to press in further to […]